I've been meaning to write another post sharing and reflecting on how I use Twitter, yet this keeps changing, as the service itself evolves at an incredible pace. Certainly Twitter is experiencing exponential growth as the users of the service expand beyond the usual early adopter crowd to a larger and more diverse general population.

However the other influence on this ever changing ecosystem are the emergence of all sorts of applications and services that allow for much greater optimization and customization. It is now way easier to tune into various customized signals amidst the noise.

For a while I was describing Twitter to people as "cloud chat" in that it was similar to a chat room, but without the walls, so potentially anyone could see what you were saying. A colleague of mine Jason Dojc in a recent tweet used a similar description: "Twitter let's you instant message the public."

Yet this only speaks to one side of both the appeal and power derived from this emerging platform. Marshall McLuhan often mocked people by saying the medium is the message, but really what he meant was to pay attention to the form rather than content.

So when the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, referred to Twitter as a poor man's email system, really he was fooled by the content of Twitter rather than the medium. As a medium, Twitter is more a search engine than a chat room, and it's not the incessant tweeting that people should be focusing on, but rather the constellation of applications that are giving shape to this growing cloud.

Update: Check out a more recent post on the subject in which I regard Twitter as a search engine

While I've been using Twitter for some time now, I keep switching up how I use the service, and I still feel I'm not at the desired configuration.

Initially I used it like anyone else, following people I found interesting, as well as anyone who decided to follow me. For the first few weeks this was fine, although I was only following a handful of people, who themselves were only tweeting occasionally.

Problems arose as I followed more people and the volume of tweets started getting higher and higher. Not only could I not keep up with it all, but it seemed that every time I logged in to check what was going on the chatter all seemed like blather and banality.

At my peak I was following and being followed by several hundred people and while I knew there were gems out there, for the most part it all seemed like nonsense to me. While I can be verbose in person, I usually don't have a lot to say online, and so my tweets are rather infrequent.

I realized what I was looking for was a means of reconfiguring my twitter use and constantly tweaking how I interact with the twittersphere.